Baby 'Lucy' found in Ethiopia

Friday, 22 September 2006 Patricia ReaneyReuters

The fossil child has been named Selam, which means peace in Ethiopia's official Amharic language (Image: Zeresenay Alemseged and Copyright Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultrual Heritages)

The skull, torso and upper and lower limbs, including the hand, show both human and ape-like features, the scientists report in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

The state of the ancient bones, found 400 kilometres northeast of the capital Addis Ababa, suggest she was buried in a flood, which may also have caused her death.

The remains provide the first evidence of what babies of early human ancestors looked like. The nearly complete skeleton will also provide information about the child's height and structure.

"This child will help us understand a lot about the species to which it belongs," says Alemseged, leader of the international team of scientists.

"The lower part of the body, which includes the foot, the shin bone and the thigh bone clearly shows us that this species was an upright walking creature," he says.

But some of the features from the upper part of the body, including the shoulder blade and arms are more ape-like.

The fingers are long and curved which suggest she might have been able to swing through trees.

"The finding is the most complete hominid skeleton ever found in the world," says Alemseged.

He says the fossil was older than the 3.2-million-year-old remains of Lucy discovered in 1974, described by scientists as one of the world's greatest archaeological finds.

"The new bones belong to a three-year-old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago, 150,000 years before Lucy," Alemseged says.

The fossil has been named Selam, which means peace in Ethiopia's official Amharic language.

Dr Simon Underdown of Oxford Brookes University in England describes it as a massively exciting discovery of a juvenile Lucy.

"This tremendous fossil will make us challenge many of the ideas we have about how and why we came to walk on two feet," he says.

An analysis of the sediment in which the remains were found enabled researchers to build a picture of the type of environment in which the child lived.

It was a lush area with flowing water, forests and grassland, which was also affected by volcanic eruptions. The range of habitats was suitable for hippos, crocodiles and relatives of the wildebeest.

"We can see from the sediment that the region was very much characterised by a mosaic of environment that ranged from forests and woodlands near the rivers, to seasonally flooded grasslands to a flood plain that would have supported more open vegetation," says Dr Jonathan Wynn of the University of South Florida, who dated the sediments surrounding the remains.

Australopithecus

Once thought by some to be our ancestor, A. afarensis is now widely considered to be a failed branch of the human tree, for many experts suspect the hominid was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.

Its brain, adjusted to its body size, was not much larger than that of a chimpanzee and although it no longer had the large canines that distinguished apes from hominids, it had relatively large chewing teeth that were still primitive.

The other comparably complete infant hominid skeleton in the fossil record is that of a Neanderthal child who lived less than 100,000 years ago.